


Words & Deeds

by smolhombre



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bonding, Canon-Typical Violence, Courting Rituals, Cultural Differences, Depression, Dysfunctional Relationships, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Family Dynamics, Flawed Characters Trying Their Best, Food & Tea as a Love Language, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Getting Together, Introspection, Let's Talk About It, PTSD, References to Torture, Retail Therapy, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Softies Only, The Ninja System is a Garbage Fire, Unreliable Narrator, Wedding Planning, Wingman Yamato, Yamanaka Ino-centric, grief and moving on, lots of feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:28:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23333884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: The problem, she’d decided that morning, was that while the rest of them flipped to another chapter, Ino lagged a few pages behind, watching them go, a train on a different track. Their pages turned around her until Ino is left nested in nothing but the empty paper, unsure of how to fill it, unsure of where to start.There's been nothing in her life she'd not been able to do by herself thus far. Ino can't begin to reason why this is different.
Relationships: Akimichi Chouji & Nara Shikamaru & Yamanaka Ino, Background Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Sasuke, Background Temari/Nara Shikamaru, Haruno Sakura & Yamanaka Ino, Inuzuka Kiba & Yamanaka Ino, Sai/Yamanaka Ino
Comments: 41
Kudos: 122





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Please heed the tags! TW throughout for references and brief depictions of torture & canon-typical violence.

Sai finds her in the greenhouse after an exceptionally miserable session with Ibiki-sensei and a missing-nin from Kumo. She’d bathed in the basement barracks of the T&I building per protocol after wrapping things up, but for the first time since her apprenticeship officially ended at eighteen, Ino felt the need to shower again upon returning to her apartment from her debrief. She made it halfway through rinsing her hair of suds before the echo of the new recruits hosing down the interrogation room swallowed the gurgle and hiss of her shower. She’d gotten out and finished cleaning herself with a rag at her sink, hardly able to leave the faucet running for five seconds at a time. When scrubbing underneath her short, neat nails hadn’t felt like she was doing enough to get the memory from under them, she’d bee-lined for the shop in an effort to replace the remembered, imagined grit with something she could stand to keep a hold of in her hands.

“This is a bad time,” Sai greets her, barely in the door and nodding a little to himself. The end of his sentence ticks up in a barely-question, like he’s making sure that interrupting her from digging elbow-deep in the quickly darkening greenhouse, crouched alone and barefoot in her ratty pajamas is, in fact, a bad idea. 

“Depends on what it’s about,” Ino grunts, tugging at a stubborn gnarl of roots starting to rot in the bottom of an over-watered sweet pea. “If you make me hurl this at you after all the work I’m putting into the fucker, I’m going to be pissed.” 

Slowly, Sai steps in the greenhouse proper. He looks a little unkempt; his hair longer than she remembers, an utterly unrepentant cowlick unexpectedly crowning the back. His civvies hang shapeless on his lean body, and most strangely to her, he’s without his gloves for the first time she can remember since the war. Reaching her worktable, he gently pushes the leaves of the sweet pea back so Ino can have more of the sunlight dying red with the evening from the roof. They’re visibly clean but smell a little like ink anyway over the tartness of the soil. His knuckles are chapped to peeling from dryness, skin moon pale against the rich greens and blacks in the pot. 

She carefully pulls back the chakra blade she’d been hacking the roots with, mindful of his slim fingers. Eye-level with his solar plexus, rising and falling steadily, she realizes how hard and fast her own breathing is. He waits for her to match his pace, unmoving and unspeaking, still holding the leaves aside even though she’s no longer pruning at them. At their feet, Ino watches the shadows in the greenhouse stretch with the darkness falling outside until the one from her worktable reaches the edge of Sai’s boot.

Ino raises her eyes to his. Sai looks back.

“You work for T&I,” Sai says, stilted, after a few beats too long of awkward silence. ”And you are a friend of Sakura’s.” He looks away from her, back down to the plant. The line of his throat bobs in quarter profile before he speaks again. The pace is all off, the words strung together like an old necklace, pieces missing that leave gaps in the chain to tangle together from being lost or forgotten in a drawer somewhere. “And maybe that helps us be friends.”

“Most of my friends try to ignore my job,” Ino offers honestly.  _ I am, this very minute, trying to do the same.  _ But if she’s pressed, Ino will admit that she believes she likes Sai, who has always been easy to read without using the shintensin at all, and it’s hard to tell him no or turn him down when it seems to be taking so much for him to be here. That kind of courage deserves a reward. And while it’s a little tempting to try to brush up along the edge of his thoughts and get a hint as to what brought him here, she’s not sure she can so soon after this afternoon without vomiting. It’s hard doing things the old fashioned way, but Ibiki-sensei would call this practice. Her father would have called it being respectful. Ino, just yet, studies Sai and wonders what she should call it.

“Most,” Sai hums, the furrow in his thin brows deepening. “But if they required assistance that you could provide because of this expertise, you’d give it.”

“Sai,” Ino says gently, pulling her hands back from the pot. She’d forgotten her apron in her haste to get her hands on anything that wasn’t a bleeding muscle or the stretch of viscera and sinew, and wipes them now on her sweats with a grimace. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Despite my efforts, I haven’t — I’m. I’m still learning about people. I know Ug— Sakura tries to be patient with me, but that’s not in her nature, and —” he cuts himself off suddenly, eyes wide and coal black. “I’m not trying to speak badly about your friend.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me,” Ino shrugs. “I know how she is better than anyone.” She rises from her crouch, thighs smarting from kneeling for so long. She’s out of shape, being pulled from the field roster as long as she has been. Asuma would have called that complacency. He always said that she was, in one way or another. “What are you asking for?”

Sai looks relieved at her direct questions. Ino figures these are the easiest for him to answer. That’s an unreasonably lucky break, because they are the easiest for her to ask, and the ones the gets to rely on the least elsewhere in her life, with Ibiki-sensei who takes them as laziness, Shikamaru who is smart enough to avoid obvious probing, and Sakura and Chouji who are too bashful and wily in their own rights to answer things directly when it really mattered.

“Can I spend time with you, please?”

There is a little blood blooming carnation pink on the tips of Sai’s ears. Ino can only see it because the night is clear — even a little cloud in the sky tonight would have hid it from her altogether.

Directness, rewarded with the same, Ino reminds herself. She likes Sai. This is even kind of sweet. She isn’t so mean, despite appearances, to mean what she says next, but figures Sai could use his first lesson in good humor.

“Are you asking me on a date?”

She watches Sai try to keep the alarm in his expression to a minimum, not thinking about the sterile smell of the interrogation room for the first time in hours. 

“I’m asking you to teach me, please. If anyone knows how people work, it must be you. I — I’m asking for a friend.” 

Ino bites her cheek to keep from smiling. Sai would only think she was making fun of him, but that would only be partly true. 

The sweet pea is doomed to die this time of year anyway. Ino waves him out of the greenhouse, feeling his eyes on her the whole time that she sets the seal on the door to lock it. “Friends we can do. Is it too late for you to come in for tea?”

* * *

“I usually make men climb in through the window, you know, just to make them prove it to me.”

If Sai wonders why Ino lives in a little apartment on the edge of the Inuzuka quarter, on the opposite end of Konoha from her family’s compound, he doesn’t ask. Ino adds it to Sai’s growing list of positive qualities.

“It?” After shucking his shoes off at her door, Sai stays frozen in the entryway like he was expecting to be shoo’ed out the next second. Ino would have figured that no matter how far Sai progressed from ROOT, expressions would never be in his wheelhouse, too far gone to really learn them authentically the way children are able to. She’s surprised at her own delight in seeing that instead, his welcome to the spectrum of human emotion has left him completely unaware as to how to hide them instead. 

“Later in the syllabus,” Ino winks, because she can’t help herself from a little humor at his expense. It had been a long day, after all. “Oolong, matcha, keemun?” Tea had become a vice somewhere around her failed ANBU attempt, since the preliminary examination rounds had both routine and unannounced physicals and blood tests that prohibited alcohol and smoking and most everything else that made living a little fun. She could have burned it off with chakra and fooled most of the medics on staff, but Sakura and Shizune-san administered them most of the time, and the risk wasn’t worth it. Knowing her limits should have put her at least into the top ten percent of the roster, being as it was a severely under-represented skill in her line of work, but since the Academy people have rarely put weight into Ino’s best ideas.

Regardless, even after that particular career plan had gone up in spectacular flames, the tea snobbery had persisted. She doesn’t mind flexing it when the time calls. Sai follows down the short hall hesitantly, not answering. She looks back at him over her shoulder, eyebrow cocked.

“None of them? Are you asking me to break out my jasmine for you? I ration that shit out, you know. It’s expensive.” 

_ Yeah, kinda cute _ . His pale face blanches even whiter, and she remembers first meeting him and thinking, specifically, that he was beautiful in the way that Ino just enjoyed  _ looking  _ at, like she would a thoughtful display arrangement in the shop or, as was more likely at the time, the jounin recommendation letter that Ibiki-sensei had submitted on her behalf. 

“I’m joking,” she assures him, pulling two pale pink cups down from the cabinet and feeling surely misplaced fondness. It  _ was  _ expensive, because she only drank the one brand, but Sai wasn’t ready for that kind of banter yet. Ino pulls it back. “Jasmine is my favorite too. I just didn’t have you pegged for white tea.”

She gives Sai the grace of her back turned to him as she fiddles with the hand-me-down kettle from her aunt and rummages for the tea, also grabbing the box of wagashi she’d been eating her feelings out of the past week. 

Sai clears his throat, softly enough Ino barely hears it. “May I sit?”

“You don’t have to ask.” She tries to keep her tone mild. “Do you like sweets? Temari-chan brought these over for my birthday. The neri-kiri are my favorite — look, see? She picked out some cute ones for me, this one’s a little bird, and there’s a bunny.”

He reaches for the sweets delicately when Ino slides them his way on the island countertop. It’s not the exact same, but she and Shino-kun had a three-week mission out to Ishigakure shortly after the war, allowing Ino to perfect the art of gentle, probing, one-sided conversation. Mostly, that was just keeping it rolling and impersonal when she could help it.

“She likes the kuri manju better, you know. I think she would probably sell state secrets for chestnuts on a bad day. They’re the only way Shika can ever apologize to her for anything, the little shit.” 

Sai accepts the tea she offers wordlessly, a little crease in his brow as he studies the box like an oracle. The overhead light hangs dimly above the island and makes a soft hum. It helps fill the space between them while she lets him make his next move.

“Sakura likes the monaka,” he says finally. “She convinced Yamato-taichou to buy her some on our last mission. But they make it hard to taste the tea. They’re too sweet.”

Her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. “Are you a tea snob? A foodie? You are full of surprises.”

The corner of his pillowy mouth twitches, pleased. “I ate ration bars until joining Team Seven. Then I ate nothing but ramen. I needed a break...Lee-san said I had to try everything or I wouldn’t know what to like.” He pauses, fingers twitching over the little green squares in the box. “I didn’t expect to have so many opinions.”

“Not a bad problem to have,” Ino grins, jerking her chin to the box he’s grabbing from. “Kusamochi? That I do believe. I’m glad I haven’t completely lost my touch.”

“Why would you have guessed that?”

Ino taps her finger to the side of her nose with a little wink. “Let me keep some of my secrets, yeah?”

Sai meets her eyes from across the counter, and she’s pleased to see he’s a little more relaxed than before. Ino lets that sit for another minute as he chews his candy, the counter cool on her forearms where she’s leaned up against it. Ibiki-sensei taught her this before anything else — how to be interrogated, long before he taught her how to interrogate. To find one part of her body and focus there like to waver were to die. It’s the only method she’d ever found to curtail her impatience even a little, even not strapped to one of Ibiki-sensei’s chairs. The counter is cool, her skin still a little sweaty, the grout between the tile barely scratching against the babyfine hair on her arms. Ino feels it all and waits.

“You don’t have to answer,” she pushes her thick hair behind her ear when the line of Sai’s shoulders loosens to something acceptable for her, watching him track the movement as the side of her neck is exposed. A very base tactic to appear nonthreatening, though it’s good enough for now. “But what prompted your visit, exactly? Is everything alright?”

He doesn’t answer for a very long minute, staring at his fingers tapping rhythmically against the yellow tile. She busies herself cataloging the ways he looks alike from before the war, and the ways he’s different — her usual method of passing time with the people unlucky enough to be around her now, to keep her mind from being too quiet.

“Sasuke-san is back tonight,” Sai takes another bite of his candy and chews it as long as he possibly can before continuing, the crunch of its sesame seeds barely audible between his teeth. “I was asked to not come along to our team dinner after he arrived. So that...so that he would come. I tried to eat by myself, but the more I thought, I...I want friends who are not my teammates. I want...to learn how to be a friend that is not optional.” He looks up to her, not even knowing to hide his hurt. “You and Sakura don’t get along all the time, but you are still friends. You are important to her life. How do you do both?”

Ino’s ears ring. Sai won’t know how to interpret it, so she tries to keep her face smooth where it wants to pinch up in sympathy. She rubs the flat of her chest, right under her collarbone where she’s started to ache, to keep herself from reaching out.

“Them being assholes isn’t your fault. It’s nothing you did.” It’s all she can manage that’s fit for polite company. Out of concern for her own sanity, Ino had stopped trying to speak sense about Sasuke or the flaming dysfunction of Team Seven to Sakura before the war, but for the first time she’s tempted to break her rule. 

“I am not a good replacement for Sasuke,” Sai says evenly, impersonal. “We are too dissimilar. And I make him actively avoid Naruto and Sakura by being present in our team outings. This upsets them, and it is my fault. As their friend, I should avoid doing things that I know will disrupt the team. So it  _ is  _ something I did, though I appreciate that you are trying to spare my feelings. I understand many people do not try. Thank you.”

Pushing off from the island with her hip, Ino crosses over to the other side of the counter and siddles up next to him. Her arms are crossed over her chest. His shoulder nearly brushes her side when she breathes deep enough. She catches him studying the nearly translucent ends of her loose hair near his elbow with his brow furrowed before looking up to meet her eyes again.

“To be clear, as your people-skills senpai, I know more about these things than you. It’s why you asked me, right?” She tries to keep her smile easy and light, even if her fingers bite into her arms. “So take my word for it.”

Clearly unconvinced, Sai returns her fake smile with one of his own, a noncommittal hum the only answer. She leans over and drags her tea over to this side of the island, and holds Sai’s stare the first long sip. Ino wonders, suddenly, when he must have to shave to not have much in the way of any stubble shadowing his jaw this time of night. It’s as good a sign as any to look away. 

They drink silently, though neither of them rush to finish their cups. The window above her tiny sink is open to keep the air moving in her little apartment, and the breeze it welcomes in smells clean and sweet between them, ruffling the blue curtain. Sai rises stiffly after another mochi and a drawn out final drag from his cup.

“Thank you for your time, Bea— Yamanaka-san. Ino,” he corrects himself, the back of his neck flushed pink. 

“I’ll see you later, okay?”

He might nod, but he’s halfway out of the door, so Ino can’t be sure.


	2. Chapter Two

It’s a surprise when Temari invites Ino back to Suna to take care of last minute wedding shit, but Ino is relieved to accept and be away from T&I, each day harder to get through than the last, to hide her growing weariness from Ibiki-sensei, who surely knows anyway. She hadn’t felt that Temari enjoyed her company to really seek it out without Shikamaru there to buffer, assuming that largely both women got along to make their respective relationships with the lazy bastard easier. Then again, Ino is becoming aware that she is perhaps wrong about things more often than she is prepared to accept.

Their pace is leisurely as they approach the farthest south-reaching border of Konoha, the trees thinning as they near what used to be Kusagakure. Gaps in their canopy dapple watery midmorning sunlight onto the ground below, the air less humid already and easier to move through. They’d have to save most of their energy to make good time for the trek through the desert, but that’s probably only part of the reason their pace is so slow.

“Remind me to show you that teahouse in the capital before we head back,” Temari says absently, arching back to stretch the line of her spine out as they rise from their lunch. “It’s where I got those wagashi from before. One of the girls in the kitchen has eyes for Gaara, she always gives Kankuro and I extra. Hoping for a good word, I guess,” she finishes with a little snort.

Ino brushes takoyaki crumbs from the front of her shirt, wiping away sauce from the corner of her mouth with her thumb. The man cooking in the market stall they’d passed was an immigrant from Kiri, and the line they’d had to wait in was well-deserved on his part. They were certainly the best she’d ever had west of Yugakure. 

“You’re already thinking about sweets,” Ino groans, patting her stomach theatrically. The market had eaten up most of their morning, and Ino has several bags of shopping she begins to seal up in some empty scrolls, her favorites packaged with extra care — a lacquered rattan bento box like only Kusa could produce, a pair of shockingly blue glazed-bead earrings from Chori no Sato that hang from a delicate half-moon of soft Iwa gold, as well as the token gifts, purchased under Temari’s guidance, for Kankuro-san and the Kazekage as thanks for welcoming her to Suna. She notes Temari’s loot is quite smaller than her own, (a small bolt of chinchilla-violet Kumo fleece for Karui’s engagement party next month and a short, blood-orange robe made of Konoha silk so fine it shimmered almost iridescently between her brown hands), but Temari has the grace to not mention her shopping habits, another reason Ino is growing to like her much more than Shikamaru. 

“I didn’t eat two trays of takoyaki by myself,” Temari grins, setting the debris from her roasted sweet potato on fire with a quick _katon_ jutsu in the palm of her left hand before squeezing it out.

“You’re eating sweet potatoes like it’s midwinter in Kumo and yet I’m the one having her choices questioned?”

They’re both chuckling as they leave the square. Ino tilts her face back to catch some of the day’s sunlight, and she feels...good. Temari isn’t as chatty as Sakura or Tenten, but the silences between them don’t feel especially awkward, and she's still miles more relaxed than Karui is able to manage. She doesn’t feel the pressure of trying to entertain Temari or impress her — they’re stuck with each other no matter what she does or does not do because Shikamaru is stuck with them both no matter what they do or do not do. The certainty is a relief, and Ino finds herself only speaking when she genuinely wants to, and only with what she genuinely wants to say. 

“I’m still amazed Shika convinced you to settle for him, you know. I always had you pegged as a smart one.” Stopped in an outpost another three hours from the promise of a comfortable bed in an ambassador's suite Ino definitely has no business staying in, she gulps from the bottle of water Temari hands her and tries to admire the dramatic swathes of red and gold of the desert to no real avail. The starkness is mostly just off putting, almost cold despite the heat, and Ino feels small under the impersonality of it. 

Temari slips the bottle back in her pack with a roguish wink, and after adjusting their scarves they set off again. “Sex is a hell of a drug.” 

“If you’re trying to rub my nose in my unwilling celibacy —”

“You and Kiba called it off?”

Ino’s mouth puckers. “If Shika is going to blab my business, the least he can do is spill it in full.” She’s desperate enough to beat her desert-induced boredom to kiss and tell, though, and picks up from where he apparently left off. “I’m not sure we were really on to begin with. It was really casual. We were both with other people the whole time. It was just…”

Temari lets her think without further prodding. The sand they kick up cuts like little blades on the exposed parts of her face. Ino remembers Kiba taking her home after Hatake-sama’s inaugural ceremony and laughing for the first time since her father died. He was too rough sometimes and far too gentle others, but the straightforward sincerity of it melted a little of the ice Ino had been collecting in the weeks prior. Kiba felt like the only reliable, constant thing she could count on for months, while Shikamaru mourned Shikaku-jii by burying himself in work or extended trips to Suna, Chouji began his campaign of emotional warfare for the chance to woo Karui, and Sakura reignited her Sasuke-related efforts two-fold. Kiba offered her no pressure, no smothering, just a promise to be there when she wanted him to be, every time she asked him to, because Kiba was good and _kind_ in the way that even the war couldn’t change.

And Ino had done it, even when it was unfair. Had asked and asked and asked until she pushed herself into a corner of actually loving him too much to ask again. Kiba was too good a friend, by the end, for Ino to keep playing with fire like that. She didn’t have many more good friends to lose.

“It was right then, but it’s not right anymore. He and Shino-kun are dragging their shit out, it’s only fair I give them space to do it.”

“I thought Aburame was going to be clan head,” Temari frowns, her voice a little muffled behind her headscarf. “They’ll still let him knowing he won’t produce an heir?”

“No offense, but most families in Leaf aren’t as old school about that stuff like Suna is.”

“Now you’re just bragging,” she says drily. “And changing the subject.”

They leap over a scorpion nest. Temari visibly chews the inside of her cheek for a moment. Ino watches her shoot a glance her way from the corner of one beautiful almond eye. “Uchiha is in the village more often these days.”

“Forehead’s problem.” Ino shrugs. Her voice is a little sharp, but she can hardly help it. 

Temari doesn’t respond, and they travel in silence for some time. The night is nearly purple when they make it to the first sentinel tower outside of the capital and Temari speaks again.

“Both of my brothers are single, you know,” she offers innocently. Ino unwinds the scarf from her face and _thwacks_ her with it.

* * *

Kankuro is not entirely single, which doesn’t upset Ino. If anything, it is the unexpected highlight of the trip. With Temari abdicating from her ceremonial position as the heir of the High Family and Gaara both the youngest and ineligible besides due to his duties as the Kazekage, it is Kankuro’s responsibility to entertain the various ladies from the daimyo’s court shuffled his way by Suna’s council. It is Ino’s responsibility to enjoy their suffering.

He was not an especially graceful or refined spirit by nature, and he vacillates seemingly at random between offending his suitors with his nearly crude gruffness or overcompensating with exaggerated gentleness, cluelessly sincere and generally patronizing. Ino loves every minute of it, only second, perhaps, to Temari.

“See what you’re missing out on?” Temari murmurs, leaned close to Ino’s ear at the dinner table while Kankuro attempted to pass a plate piled with spiced flatbread to tonight’s date — a bored-looking woman about five years Ino’s senior with a heart shaped face that belonged on a magazine and heavy lines bracketing her mouth belying the fact that she smoked quite heavily — only to elbow her face as she reached for the table's little jug of hot honey. 

“It’s better than the lovesick ones,” Ino grins back, speaking in a soft, breathy falsetto, “ _‘My, Kankuro-dono, Aiko-chan said shinobi were scary, but I didn’t know they could be as strong as you!’_ ” She shoots Kankuro a tiny wink as he scoops out some pickled citrus from the bowl across from her. He yanks her plate back a few inches with a chakra string when she goes in for a bite, the paint on his face twisted in a little snarl. Ino cackles, unable to help herself. The noblewoman glares daggers at the both of them.

From her left, Gaara’s cheek twitches, nearly like a smile. He never eats with them, but for three of the five nights of Ino’s visit so far he’s made a brief appearance, though he tends to stay longer on nights like tonight when they aren’t in the formal dining room. Ino doesn’t blame him; the meals there were theatrical, drawn out affairs more about politics than eating and though the zabuton provided were relatively comfortable and certainly finely made, sitting cross-legged like they did in Konoha was vulgar in Suna, and kneeling at the polished chabudai for hours on end inevitably spoiled the food, a little. 

Sure enough, he leaves wordlessly only ten minutes later, and Ino watches him go with her chin propped on her hand. She thinks, just for a second, about the last time she, Chouji, and Shikamaru were able to get dinner together. Going through the ceremony schedules with Temari that afternoon had left a little drop of lead in Ino’s belly, growing heavier each minute like it had a mind to create its own gravitational pull. This was an ending or beginning, though she couldn’t be sure which. The problem, she’d decided, was that while the rest of them flipped to another chapter — Shika and Chouji and Sakura and even steadfast Kiba — Ino lagged a few pages behind, watching them go, a train on a different track.

“Sometimes I wonder if I could have lived with siblings.”

“It sucks,” Temari and Kankuro say in unison. Kankuro’s dour date rolls her eyes, helping herself to another generous pour of Kiri sake from the carafe in the table’s center. Bold as you please, she pulls out a thin magazine, rolled into the thick knots of her obi, and begins to read it. Ino likes the woman despite herself.

* * *

They do stop by the teahouse before Ino returns to Konoha the next week. Temari, pleased with the final guest list they had pruned to completion the night prior, orders one of every chestnut wagashi they offer. Ino gets the neri-kiri she prefers, one shaped like a violet, one a peach, another a green clover with a precious little ladybug atop. Ino scrapes it off and sets it to the side of her plate, unable to eat the thing.

“I have some shit still to finish,” Temari says around her mouthful, an expression of almost dazed pleasure briefly on her face. “You sure you have to get back? You could stay. The rainy season festival starts next week, and a fresh shipment of victims is coming for Kankuro. You’ll even get to see him dance.” 

Ino slows her chewing and puts her cup back on their table, studying Temari’s face. Her coarse hair is not as frizzy here as the humidity in Konoha keeps it. Smudged in her gold hairline is some of the chalky red dust they’d purchased in the main square earlier, its use a concession to Suna’s council for the penultimate of their three ceremonies, and the heady saffron and amber perfume of it tickles the back of Ino’s nose. Temari is a friend, but they aren’t so close that Temari should really be asking that after nearly two weeks of constant company. 

“Shika mentioned that you were really dragging your feet with this planning stuff a few weeks ago, you know.” Ino traces the clay cup’s unglazed edge with her ring finger, the slight roughness an anchor Ibiki-sensei taught her to use. “You were bored with it. He said you both just wanted to go turn in the paperwork and avoid this shit altogether.”

“Both the councils said that wouldn’t be appropriate, given the circumstances,” Temari says quickly. Ino ignores it.

“I thought Shika was just projecting. When you asked for help I knew he was.”

Temari looks like she is grimacing a little behind the next sip from her cup. Good. She knows that Ino knows.

“But now I’m not sure. Why did you ask me to come, Temari-chan?” The honorific is the final nail in the coffin. Temari exhales in a loud _whuff,_ pinching between her eyebrows. Ino watches her and doesn’t feel badly at all. 

“He asked,” she admits slowly, “if you could come when I came back on my next trip. If I could invite you, to get you out of Konoha for a while.”

Ino feels a muscle in her jaw flutter. “Why.”

“Ino,” Temari sighs. “You know why. Don’t put me in the middle.”

“I believe he’s done that already,” Ino snips, but she takes another drink and doesn’t press it again. Half-formed thoughts ricochet pachinko ball-quick, murky and ugly, against the swell of the others surrounding her in the bustling bazaar. Ino breathes in until her head feels less crowded, then until it feels like she’s the only one in it, again.

It will make punishing Shikamaru less fun if she wastes any on Temari. She repeats it enough to act like she believes it. It’s not worth an international incident, at the very least. She downs her drink in one go, entirely wasting the extra ryo she’d spent on using the top shelf leaves. “I have to get going. Ibiki-sensei needs a report from me when I make it back to Konoha.”

Temari doesn’t press her further, quickly jamming the remaining two mochi in her mouth whole and rising to her feet. Begrudgingly Ino appreciates it. Sakura would be yammering her ear off by now, poking and poking until she got a rise.

Would she have done the same, in Shikamaru’s place? Frowning, Ino thinks not. She would have just _asked_ — why did he always have to do things the long way around? He’s too smart to not know Ino would have been honest, if he’d asked, because it was him that was asking. He knows that would have meant more than two weeks off of work that she didn’t ask for, eating and shopping with a friend-by-obligation. Gnawing her bottom lip, she remembers Sai in her kitchen, eating the same candy still stuck a little to her back teeth now, asking how to be a better friend. She probably shouldn’t be giving any advice in that regard, in retrospect.

Ino watches Temari hesitate before reaching out to wrap her in a brief, feather-light, one armed hug. “Don’t kill him before I’m able to.”

“I guess,” Ino manages. _Avoid international incident. Gaara can see you here anyway, you wouldn’t get away with it. Shika would just get forewarning to change the board again if you move now._ “Only because you bought me sweets, though.”

Temari sets off to the Kazekage’s offices with a forced smile and little wave while Ino begins her trek towards the eastern gate, her frown heavier than any of her bags or scrolls. She only makes it a few yards before turning heel and returning to the shop, digging a couple of ryo from her pouch, barely half a plan in mind.

“Excuse me, do you have any kusamochi left?”


	3. Chapter Three

There is a box of jasmine tea on her kitchen windowsill when Ino returns. In very neat, formal calligraphy, someone has written _thank you for your assistance_ inside a thick white card tucked underneath the box. The front has a sweet pea flower painted on it. Clean black lines, their ink a little satiny in the light.

Ino grabs the box — the same Kumo brand she prefers, the delicate smell to her nose comforting as her favorite lavender quilt — and has to stop herself from holding it to her chest. The plan she’d not been able to stop herself from poring over the trek back home starts to shift at its edges like a mirage. 

_That’s nice_ , she thinks, and it’s the first nice thing Ino’s thought of in hours. Sand has rubbed her feet raw inside of her boots, and her nose and cheeks are tight with sunburn. There’s laundry and bathing and a list of other things she needs to be doing before reporting back to work the next morning, but Ino can’t think of anything more pressing now than a cup of tea.

While the kettle boils, Ino kicks her boots off gracelessly and slips her bra off from under her shirt, flinging it somewhere that it’s not her problem anymore. She gives herself a few good shakes to rid herself of lingering grains before plopping onto one of her mismatched, creaky stools, one of her mismatched, chipped teacups in front of her, and takes a minute for herself.

The night falls full dark around her as she drinks, her mind wandering where it will. She doesn’t bother putting in the effort to block out the snips of thoughts and feelings that brush against her awareness from the other tenants in her building. After hours of dead silence through the desert, then the thick woods of the First after finally crossing the border home, it’s almost a relief. It’s not Ino alone in the miserable world.

When she was smaller, letting herself run a little loose into other people’s consciousness was relaxing. It was better than escaping into a movie or a book. It hasn’t felt that way in a very long time, but tonight it’s close. Being in proximity to someone else’s happiness or ease soothes Ino, for once, instead of poking her inadequacy. 

She leaves her cup on the counter when she’s finally done, and runs a very hot bath. Ino dumps the last drops of her Yukigakure rose absolute in the water — a very expensive gift to herself after her last S-Rank almost a full year ago that she rations for emergencies — and when she pulls her hair back for work the next morning, the smell of it makes her wonder if maybe today won’t be a total waste.

* * *

Ibiki-sensei leaves for a last minute mission to Ame three days before Ino returns from Suna, and she busies herself for most of her first morning back decoding his incoming reports with a modified Iron Wall seal on her office door and a spider in the hall outside that she occasionally switches consciousness with to surveil for passersby. She deciphers them without taking any notes or elsewise scribbling on the papers to help her keep the different codes straight — he doesn’t check her work anymore, of course, but he drilled the habit into her so fiercely when she was younger that she always kind of expects him to — before summarizing it all into a single coded scroll for Hatake-sama and burning Ibiki-sensei’s originals. Surely this is only half of the information Ibiki-sensei is actually collecting at most, but no matter that Ino thinks he is as soft with her as he is genuinely capable, he doesn’t put his eggs in one basket. He’s sent a direct report to the Hokage with the most sensitive information and at least two others with less pressing details to junior tokubetsu jounin in the division to re-code into the standard Konoha cypher from the internal ones T&I used. Shikamaru would receive those to pass off to some desk-bound chuunin to file into obscurity, another code unto itself.

Ino, for a very long time, was happy to be second to Tsunade-sama, then Hatake-sama, in terms of confidential material she was privy to — for a while, more than even Shika was. That felt like a reward, and something Ino had worked hard to earn by her own merit, considering Ibiki-sensei was, if anything, more demanding of her because she was Inoichi’s daughter than he was other subordinates in the department. Certainly, she’d been his only formal pupil and the only shinobi he’d recommended for jounin consideration from the division since becoming its head, but Ibiki-sensei didn’t make decisions from a place of affection. Everything Ino has professionally she’s earned herself, and after Asuma-sensei’s neglect she’d been doubly proud to say so. 

But she watches her hand form the bubbly hiragana for “ _vivisection_ ” like it isn’t her hand at all, and in the privacy of her windowless office can no longer say that she feels the same. She swallows thickly and moves to notes from the next informant.

Her father didn’t die for Ino to be a coward. Ino did not suffer through Asuma’s reluctant, half-assed tutelage and Ibiki-sensei’s rigorous mentorship to buckle now, of all times, when the war was won and business was settling back to usual.

Usual murder. Usual torture. Usual lies and cheating and the smell that a _raiton_ leaves on someone’s skin or the specific gurgle someone makes being waterboarded. It hadn’t phased her when she was younger. Now that Ino knows how much worse it all could be, she’s not sure why she’s become such a baby about it.

She turns her left hand over, palm up, and slices the skin below the top knuckle of her ring finger with a little chakra blade. Blood drips onto the scroll’s seal, whorls of ink blurring and smudging a little under the heavier blots. Ino doesn’t bother wasting time or chakra to heal it and prevent scarring anymore and pops it in her mouth instead, blood bright and coppery on her tongue. Unbearable. She’s grimacing when she pulls it away, but she checks the spider outside the door and is glad no one is there to see it.

* * *

By luck or the asshole’s insufferably good planning, Shika is the one Ino has to hand her report off to.

“Nara-dono,” she deadpans. Her rage sears white hot in the places her bones meet the joint and her skin meets the meat beneath, and she pushes down on it with enough pressure to form a little diamond burning hot as a star somewhere behind her navel — far from the surface, far from the reach of reason. To his credit, he blanches an appropriate shade in answer.

“Should I let you rake me over the coals first or will you let me get a headstart?” He exhales on a big, shaky _whoosh_ , thin brows furrowed warily. 

Ino cocks her head to the side. Her ponytail is nearly long enough to brush his desk. “What would I have to rake you over the coals for?”

He scratches the patchy wisps he calls a goatee. Unprompted, while they stood in the Nara shrine with smoke still tart on the backs of their tongues, Yoshino-san had mentioned that Shikaku-jii was nearly thirty-four before “that shit on his face stopped being repellent.” Shikamaru is, seemingly, faring no better. Ino now understands Yoshino’s conviction.

“I was worried, Ino.” The words grate through his pained grimace like they clawed their way out with nails like glass shards and salted the wounds after.

“Don’t hurt yourself there,” Ino snarls, waspish.

Shikamaru looks pointedly over her shoulder to the parrot and tiger faced ANBU stationed on either side of the door to the Hokage’s receiving room, mouth tight. 

“Shame if Omu-san knows you have feelings.” That hard little star in her gut is closer now to the touch. Ino’s ready to reach for it. 

But it’s the tiger-masked soldier who flashes, at his left hip, the hand signs for _Ishi — below — coming_.

“Thank you, Tora-san,” Shikamaru grunts, raking a hand through his hair. “The son of Ishi’s new council-head is coming for his first diplomatic visit. Bastard’s early — you’ll have to wait.”

“Convenient.”

Shika’s mouth and brow both flatten, cement heavy. From behind the door there’s a shuffle of the woven linen robes favored in Ishi this time of year. Because she knows Shika hates anything even vaguely resembling nagging, she makes a point to tap the scroll on his desk. “We need direction before noon tomorrow on this.”

They are well matched in pettiness if nothing else. He doesn’t deign to answer her unnecessary reminder, even with an eye roll, and when she reaches the door Ino makes a show of bowing to the lanky diplomat in the way they did out in the east — a quarter dip at the waist, face upturned still, the curved index of her left hand briefly touching her brow — though she has no business doing so. Her parting smile is a little too wide and friendly, and with a stretch so slight it’s hardly a shintenshin, she delights in the thoroughly disrespectful thoughts the man has about her as she exits the building at a civilian’s pace. He doesn’t pay a lick of attention to Shikamaru’s formal welcome, and Shikamaru is fully aware of it. Ino’s smiling as she steps out into the bustle of the street.

* * *

“Oi, Ino! Pig! _Hello_!”

Ino pushes her sunglasses up the bridge of her sweaty nose, looking over her shoulder to see Sakura waving a bulky arm at her wildly. 

“Trying to wake the dead, Forehead?” She drawls, wiggling her fingers in parting to the market vendor whose vegetables she’d been considering for the night’s supper. Sakura’s arm is slick with sweat when she nudges Ino’s own once they’re close enough. 

“Thought you were dead,” she sighs theatrically, taking one of Ino’s bags and hooking it over her own arm as they begin walking in-tandem to the northern end of the farmer’s market square. “Guess you were just ignoring me.” She presses a hand briefly to her chest, face screwed up in mock pain.

“That so? I seem to remember the lights always being off in your apartment when I swing by after work now. I wonder where you could be?” Ino taps her chin, looking up into the late-afternoon sky. End-of-summer clouds are heavy punctuation marks in the deep blue of it, promising another thunderstorm before the night’s out.

Sakura, on cue, folds back into herself, cheeks pink. “I— I can’t help if Ibiki-san keeps you that late and you miss me before my shift at the hospital! I have nights again while Aya-chan is on her honeymoon!”

“You’re working nights, alright,” Ino smirks, reaching over to tug at the mandarin collar of her crimson blouse where a fading hickey mottles the base of her neck. Sakura squawks, clapping her hand over her throat to cover it.

“ _Don’t_!” She hisses, looking around them with none of the subtlety someone trained by a Sannin should possess.

Ino cocks her eyebrow as they approach a vendor with baskets of fat, ruby red strawberries stacked high in their cart. They stop without having to discuss it, and Sakura wordlessly holds open a woven sack for Ino to start piling them in.

“He has you sworn to secrecy?” Ino asks lightly, sneaking a small berry while the farmer speaks to a tall woman with a crop of white-blonde hair on the other side of the stall. It’s perfectly in season, and she bites back a little hum as she wipes juice from her chin.

Sakura sighs. “I don’t — he’s not even really back, and I don’t want to overwhelm him with...people talk about him enough.”

“Talking about you two fucking is surely preferable to them talking about him committing treason,” Ino offers reasonably.

Sakura’s face hardens. Her small mouth purses underneath her pert nose. “That’s not what happened.”

“People already know, is all I’m saying.” Ino slides the gap-toothed vendor a few extra ryo for her petty theft and they turn to amble past a few carts full of fragrant seeds and spices. “And if he wasn’t _‘overwhelmed’_ by Orochimaru, or by killing his brother, or by joining Akatsuki, or by Uchiha Madara, the rumor mill wondering if the boning started before or after Hatake-sama’s inauguration and if the sharingan can _actually_ make someone orgasm on command —”

“ _Ew_!” Sakura squeals, her eyes unsettlingly green now against the violently red flush of her square face. 

“Guess not,” Ino shrugs. “Shame. Wouldn’t be a good girlfriend if I didn’t say you deserved at least that.”

The familiar scowl she gives her makes each of Ino’s steps easier than the last. It’s almost as good as a physical anchor. Ibiki-sensei had said Ino was an overachiever.

“...Don’t call him Hatake-sama either,” Sakura grumbles after a minute, likely still puzzling over the semantics of sharingan-related sexual activity. Ino knows hickeys push the limits of Sakura’s prudishness, and Sasuke didn’t seem an adventurous or particularly giving lover, rendering it wholly wasted on the two of them if it even were possible. “It’s fucking weird. Even Kaka-sensei doesn’t like it.”

 _Why do you think I do it_? Ino thinks, but keeps her mouth shut. In the gentle breeze that starts to pick up around them, the yerba mate in her bag wafts up to her nose, earthy and botanical. She sweeps her heavy, hot hair over one shoulder and looks at Sakura still chewing the inside of her cheek and fuming.

“Is he settling in at all?” She asks, her voice more gentle than Sasuke could really ever deserve. Sakura deflates instantly, and they come to a stop under the shade of an oak at the square’s edge.

“He’s...trying.”

“I’m sure being with the team is helping. It’s an adjustment.” She flicks her gaze over the mint-green frame of her sunglasses, watching Sakura nod emphatically. Without the shintenshin at all, Ino hears her thinking just through the years she has under her belt of knowing her — _yes, exactly, someone finally gets it_ — and with her guard down, Ino throws out the first hook. “You and Naruto and Kakashi-san,” she makes an effort to hide her little pause here by adjusting her bags in her hands, “even Sai and Yamato-san, it’s good that Sasuke doesn’t have to get settled alone. It’s important we all have our team still.”

Sakura pauses, wary. “Well…” She licks her lips and glances around quickly, like she really were looking for Sasuke to come and scold her. Ino files that niggling discomfort in her gut away to think over later. _Time and place_ , she reminds herself. It sounds like Ibiki-sensei before it sounds like her father.

“I think I know what the problem is.” Sakura looks up the few inches of height Ino has on her, eyebrows raised. Ino isn’t in the mood to crack jokes, but the best time to chip at someone’s defense was when they wanted you to start swinging at it. “He can only fuck one of you at a time. It’s causing tension,” she finishes solemnly, a sage nod to top it off. 

Sakura _whacks_ her side with her little civilian purse. “You’ve spent too much time with Kiba,” she scolds, but her posture is relaxed when she draws away. _When is the last time you asked me about Kiba?_ Ino wonders. One day she may even ask. 

“I think he doesn’t feel...secure in his spot anymore, or something.” She tucks her hair — grown out almost to her shoulders now, not without Ino’s notice — behind her ear and worries her lip between her teeth. “He probably won’t ever not feel guilty for what he did.” _Good_. “Naruto thinks he doesn’t believe he deserves it anymore, and I think...Sai and Yamato-taichou make him have to relive all the mistakes and the hurt. It’s the only reason they even had to get involved in Team Seven, anyway,” she adds thoughtlessly, and Ino frowns despite herself. “And having them there all the time...makes him want to run again.”

“‘Involved’? You mean ‘joined’?” 

“It’s not...the same, I guess. They weren’t really there for the worst parts.”

“I’d argue the war was a pretty bad one,” Ino huffs, finally pushing her sunglasses up off of her face and onto the top of her head to study Sakura with naked scrutiny. “Not being left on a bench bad, I get it, but —”

“Why do I even _bother_ with you, Pig!” The seal on her forehead seems to flex with her temper, and just for a second its jade edges seem to threaten to bleed out, a little. 

“He’s going to have to face it eventually, Billboard Brow.” It’s an effort to keep her voice even. She’s not sure she succeeds. “Babying him like you are is just letting him run. Again.”

“ _You don’t know_ ,” Sakura seethes, full of venom. She all but flings Ino’s bag back to her. “Everyone thinks they can judge when they don’t have _any_ idea what they would do if they were in the same spot!”

The familiar team-seven headache begins to pinch between Ino’s eyes. She speaks in monotone, the rote words so familiar they don’t mean anything to Ino anymore. She knows they mean even less to Sakura than the first time she said them. “Sasuke isn’t the only person this village ever failed, Sakura. He’s just the only one allowed to act like it.”

“Oh, fuck you, Ino,” she snaps. 

“You know I’m not wrong. I’m not trying to be a bitch.”

“No, I know you can’t help it,” Sakura spits, turning heel and storming back off into the crowds of the market. Ino wipes sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, head throbbing down deep into her neck and shoulders. The sky above gives its first far off rumble. The afternoon bleaches a little grey from the west. Ino doesn’t have time to dwell before the rain starts — she settles the straps of her bags in the crook of her elbows as she piles her hair on top of her head, slides her sunglasses back down, and hopes she remembers the address right.

* * *

The apartment building is, frankly, leagues nicer than what Ino expects. It’s newer and more well kept than her own is, stationed on the southern edge of the Hyuuga square. Box gardens peppered in inky-rich pansies and kaleidoscope puffs of phlox punctuate neatly-tended crabapple trees that separate the complex from the nearby stretch of boutique shops and the outermost dwellings of the most distant Hyuuga relatives still allowed to live near the main house. All very well-to-do, all very tastefully considered.

It’s also closer to her own flat than she realized, but Ino quickly shoves that errant, useless thought away. There’s no mat or shoe rack in sight, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s at the wrong door. If anything it may be a sign she got the number right.

She kneels down and pulls the box from her bag, wondering wholly inappropriately what the inside may look like behind the doorway. She doesn’t immediately rise to her feet, taking the unnecessary extra seconds to center the thing in front of the door. Her first critical error.

The flat is on the fourth of the building’s five floors, and Ino feels the wobble of a plucked string in her gut when someone crests the landing behind her. She’s not a sensor prodigy, but can feel the hum of the trap when it flares in answer of the new presence, bent close as she is to the jutsu’s center.

“Ino?”

Grimacing, she rises to her feet and glances over her shoulder. Fallen strands from her sloppy bun blur his outline in wheat blonde, but unfortunately don’t do much in the way of keeping him from getting closer.

“Ino?” He says again, a furrow creasing his smooth brow. The cowlick is nowhere to be seen, not that she’s sure why she cares.

“Sai,” she smiles thinly, tucking hair behind her ear. “Sorry to bother you. I just...wanted to stop by. To drop this off, if you weren’t around. And to...and to see you, if you were.”

His brows shoot up to his hairline. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Consistent chapter length? I don't know her.


	4. Chapter Four

There’s more color on the walls and approximately ten times the candles she could have possibly guessed he would own past the doorway. They’re stacked in order by wax color, then by size, atop a bookshelf that, while neat, could not hold a single book more in the corner of the large main room. Most of them don’t look like they have been lit at all.

“Is it impolite to offer you tea and assume you want to stay, or is it rude to not offer it at all?”

Sai’s taller than she realized, stood near shoulder to shoulder as they are in his narrow entryway like this. (The shoe rack is inside. Ino should have guessed he would be one of those types.) She cranes her neck up to grin at him. It feels like stretching out a muscle she’d not used in a while. It’s nice.

“In general, you always offer, even if you know they won’t say yes.” She raises the box in her hands. “But if they bring you tea-specific gifts, or if they are _me_ , then especially yes.”

His eyebrows lift, pleased, and he waves her forward. Ino attempts to be subtle in clocking the space — the exits of course, on habit, but also how it smells like inks and paper and turpentine, all the things she would have expected, as well as the linseed oil they polished their weapons with and bleach. She files that last one away for later. The living room has a large, sliding glass door onto a balcony that takes up almost the entire wall opposite the entry. The afternoon dims each minute longer she’s there in anticipation of the coming rain, but just by the weak light streaming through now Ino can only imagine the sun it lets in on a good day. Mostly unframed canvases are hung on the walls — lots of landscapes, though she spots some studies of plants and a stylized hawk like they kept in the Hokage’s aviary in between them. 

“I’m gonna be honest,” she says, when it becomes clear he will not initiate anything further, “maybe I’m working from a limited sample size, but I was expecting...kind of a bachelor pad. This is nice.”

A crease furrows his brow as he turns the light on in his kitchen, separated from the main room by a small breakfast bar. “You’ve thought about where I live?”

 _Shit_. Go back —

“I mean, when I tracked you down to give you these, I had to wonder,” she grins. _Divert_. “I’m assuming you painted those, but I don’t think I’ve seen you use this style before. Do you just use your other for your jutsu?”

Sai’s brow doesn’t smooth as he fills the electric kettle on his very neat counter, or when he pulls out two plain, matching cups from the shelf above his sink, or even when he opens the cabinet closest to his fridge, where Ino spots a well-organized lazy susan that he pulls the tea from. 

“The other is faster,” he says finally, when Ino is debating prompting him again. “And more versatile. The strokes are wider per centimeter, so there’s more ink to channel chakra through.” He pours the water over the tea in the cups as Ino tries to keep all the surprise off of her face. “And it’s...nice to have something I don’t — don’t associate with work.”

He slides the cup her way over the bar, and Ino is slow to reach out to accept it. “...That’s not a bad idea,” she says finally. The ceramic in her hands is warm and soothing. Ino focuses on that, just for a second, and nothing else.

“Yamato-taichou suggested it. He carves by hand when he isn’t working. He never uses the mokuton unless he’s training or on a mission.” Sai takes a sip of his tea, and he doesn’t bother hiding how he studies her at all. “It’s the same with your gardening, isn’t it?”

Ino exhales slowly. The cup isn’t plain as she’d originally thought — she can make out a blue smudge in the very bottom like a chrysanthemum, though the tea grows darker every second and she can’t be entirely sure.

“I…” She looks up to Sai, meeting him where he is watching her and not looking away. It doesn’t seem fair, suddenly, to fib. “To be honest, I don’t think so. I haven’t been able to plant or garden because I like it since...since I became a jounin, I guess. I only tend the ones at the shop anymore, really.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve brought up something that upsets you.” A frown grows on his face that’s more akin to a grimace than anything else.

“I’d let you know,” she assures him, taking another sip from her tea. “You don’t always talk about pleasant things with your friends. They’re your friends usually because you’re able to trust them with things that aren’t.” 

For a minute, Ino curses herself for laying it on too thick. But Sai is pink at the tips of his ears and just barely on his cheeks when he adds, shyly, “and we’re friends.”

“I don’t go around sharing sweets with just anyone.” 

“Thank you...for the gift. But more — I. Thank you for remembering the kind I like.”

There is, brief and bright as a lightning bolt, that urge again. To look, and keep looking, and maybe to touch. What would he do, if she reached over the counter to touch his cheek or smooth his hair back?

Risky. 

“Since we’re friends, can I ask you about something unpleasant?” He breaks her out of her reverie.

“What do you want to know?”

“Is it because of your job?”

Ino freezes, cup halfway to her mouth. “Is what because of my job?” She echoes just to bid for time.

“That you don’t garden like you used to.” He pauses. “That you don’t smile as much.”

“Have you been watching me enough to have a point of comparison?”

Sai seems to shake himself, visibly swallowing as he looks away. Ino zeroes in on the bob of his throat and tries to think about nothing else for a minute as she avoids answering that question. At the edge of her awareness, Ino feels icy guilt and self-recrimination sour from the other side of the bar, noisy without a shintenshin at all.

“I apologize, Ino-san.”

“You don’t have to.” She yanks her hair free of the tie, suddenly pulling and pinching terribly, before shaking it out. “Please don’t...you don’t have to use -san. It feels better when you don’t.”

In a nervous tic she thought she’d beat when she was fourteen, Ino starts to plait her hair loosely over one shoulder, eyes trained on the counter as she plans her way out of this.

“Ino.” When she looks up, Sai is focused on her fingers in her hair. “I had to leave ROOT.”

“I know,” she frowns.

“If they hadn’t disbanded, I would have still left. When Aburame-san began to rebuild it into something else, I turned down his offer to join again. Even in a higher position.”

“Pay must have been good.” There is a little, leaden dread starting to weigh heavy in her gut.

“It was. But I did not want to do it anymore.”

“If I didn’t know better I’d think someone put you up to this.”

His ears have soared past pink, settled straight to scarlet. “I’m sorry, I just...I can’t help but notice...you,” he finishes lamely, voice a little hoarse.

Ino takes a long sip from her cup, until she’s sure she can keep her voice even and mild. “Some days are hard. But the work has to get done.”

“By you?”

“Better me than someone else Ibiki-sensei would have to break in.”

“From my understanding, Ibiki-san breaks in his team regardless of your presence.”

She has to glance up to be sure, but there’s a faint, wry curl to his mouth. “Word is gonna spread you have a sense of humor if you keep this up.”

Just before Sai takes another sip from his cup, Ino hears the soft _whuff_ that she realizes, a spark in her belly that flutters before it burns itself out, is a laugh.

A rumble outside cuts off whatever it is Ino had her mouth open to say, which doesn’t seem important now, anyway. “I should go.”

“It’s going to rain,” he frowns.

“That’s why I’ve got to go.” Before she can talk herself out of it, Ino straightens, walking the cup back into his kitchen and checking his hip lightly with her own. His eyebrows are near his hairline when she reaches the sink and looks back at him over her shoulder. “Are you done with your cup?”

Blinking owlishly, Sai hands it over. Ino runs the water over her fingers until the tips are pink and the temperature is hot enough, humming as she gives the ceramic a quick wash before settling them on his drying rack.

“I didn’t wash your cups,” his voice is grave and almost accusatory.

“Next time you come over I’ll have a whole sinkful, if you want to make it up to me.”

Another rumble. Ino grins up at him, reminding herself not to touch, and not to look too much.

“I have a mission in Iwa I leave for tonight,” Sai says slowly as he follows her to his front door, watching her don her shoes. “I won’t be back for maybe a week. How many dishes do you think you’ll accumulate before I’m able to repay you?”

“If I tell you, you may not come at all.” Outside already smells the heavy green of summer rain, even though the drops that fall only just plod a slow, erratic tempo against the pavement below. “Thank you for the tea.”

“Thank you for your time.”

Before she leaves, Ino raises her hand, her first two fingers held out. She tries to not feel foolish as Sai stares at them, befuddled, for what seems like a very long minute. When he finally raises his own, Ino wraps her fingers over his. She hadn’t done this since she was maybe a genin in the Academy, and even if it feels a little silly, she’s grinning.

“Good luck on your mission.”

Sai only hums a little in his throat, his expression peculiar as she gives him a last little wave and walks out of the door.

* * *

Ino is only just cresting the market square again, barely past the smithery Tenten apprentices in, when she feels something approaching behind with some speed. She waits until she can feel the air shift the strands of her hair before ducking down, one leg swung out as she puts her hands up for a quick seal, but Sai jumps over it neatly.

“I’m sorry,” he says, a little breathless. He’s careful to keep very still as Ino rises, trying to shake the lingering tension out of her back and shoulders. 

“What’s wrong?”

Sai swallows, looking down at the ground. The rain has picked up since she left the apartment complex, now a steady drone around them punctuated by the closer rumbles from the lightning flashes she can see in the east towards the Nara forest. 

“You don’t have an umbrella. Didn’t. I wanted to bring you one.” Slowly still, as if he doesn’t want to spook her again, Sai raises the little collapsible one in his hands. There is a soft, loose thing that starts to unfurl in her belly, stretching out the length of her spine. 

“You don’t have one either,” Ino points out, only distantly aware that they were both stood in an empty street, speaking as if the sky wasn’t opening up further by the minute.

“Does that matter?” Sai frowns, puzzled. His hair is plastered to his brow with rainwater. He licks stray droplets from his full upper lip. 

Ino, suddenly, isn’t sure that it does.

“Can I walk you home?” He prompts her, when Ino doesn’t speak for a minute, far too busy _looking_.

“Do you want to?”

His eyes are dark, and the sky is overcast making them too hard to really see, so Ino reads into the bob of his throat instead. That warm, soft, taffy-like drag is pulling her places she thought were boarded up, lock and key and blood seal.

_Bad idea. Refuse. Tell him no. Don’t, don’t don’t —_

“I want to.” 

_Shit._ What use is she against that?

He slides the umbrella open, the sleeve of his shirt brushing her bare bicep and the long line of his body warm beside her as they begin walking again. The muffled pitter-patter of the rain sluicing against the black fabric overhead nestles in the quiet spaces between them, and Ino is glad to puzzle it against the barracks soap and ink and vetiver smell of him. The first two she can reason away, though the last one gives her pause. The thought of him shopping in the aisles for aftershave or cologne is a little hard to reconcile. Even slivers of vanity seem incongruous with the Sai she thought she knew.

Suddenly, and unnecessarily, and embarrassingly, Ino wonders if she bothered to put perfume on today herself. She wonders if Sai has an opinion on it, and if that matters to her as to if she wears it again, and, hypothetically, which kind he _would_ like. Hypothetically, as a thought experiment. 

“Ino?”

Jolting, Ino whips around. Her face feels so hot the rainwater may well evaporate on it.

“I’m so sorry, Sai —”

Smiling, Sai reaches to fold the umbrella. Looking up, Ino realizes they are under the small awning at her doorstep.

“If I didn’t have to leave tonight, I would have let you stand there longer, I promise. You looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

She smacks his shoulder, giggling. It feels rusty, but...nice. Kind of easy, by the end.

Ino is still grinning when he reaches over to a little water dripping from the end of her plait. She is very still when he brushes the tips of her hair, dark with the rain, and barely against the rise of her chest as he draws away. He looks between his hand and her hair like he can’t quite puzzle them out. 

“Thank you very much.” Her mouth is dry, and her voice muffled-sounding. Ino isn’t sure what she is even saying.

His eyebrows lift a little. “You are...very much welcome.” A pause. “Make sure you dry off. When you’re inside, I mean. When I — after I leave.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Ino watches his throat bob again. She’s not looking at his face to know, but she wonders what he is seeing now, too.

“I’ll see you when I get back home.”

The knob is slick under Ino’s hand after she flashes a quick seal to release the ward there. She forces herself to meet his eyes when she’s got one foot in her threshold. “I hope that you do.”

Though she’d promised him elsewise, Ino beelines for the shower as soon as the lock is clicked behind her, navigating the dark of her apartment on muscle memory alone. She stands under the spray until she feels able to fit in her body again properly. 

Ino had _plans_. Ino makes plans, and she has reasons, and she finishes things in the way that she intended when she started them. She’s a fucking good shinobi for it. But the water circling the drain takes them down the pipes alongside the suds, leaving only the question:

What the _hell_ had that been about?

* * *

Early the next morning, the dawn still bleeding soft and pink over the horizon, a noise drags Ino to her door. Her hair still plaited and pinned against the back of her head from sleeping, she tightens the belt on her short lavender robe and fists the kunai in its front pocket. 

Stretching out a little shintenshin, Ino only finds the one presence outside. Huffing, her hand is already on the knob when they call out from the other side of the door.

“This the way you greet a returning _hero_ , fresh from a _harrowing_ month in Kiri? I brought food, open up already before I eat it myself.”

“It’s barely five in the morning,” Ino croaks. “No food can make up for that.”

“You don’t mean it,” Kiba shrugs. There are two heavy looking bags in his hands that _would_ probably smell good if Ino were fully awake enough to eat. “Good morning, Princess.” 

Without so much as another word, he weasels around her sleep-clumsy body and into the entryway like it was his apartment to barge in to. Swearing a blue streak, Ino’s got the door almost fully closed when she sees the black umbrella tucked behind one of the bushes on either side of her front step, a little card tucked behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They can have a little yearning...as a treat :)
> 
> Thanks for reading! Feedback is always appreciated <3


	5. Chapter Five

“So, who is it?”

“Who is who?”

Kiba shoots her a flat, unimpressed glare around his mouthful of rice. “Save it for someone else, princess. I ain’t in the habit of buying your bullshit anymore.”

Ino snatches up a pickled plum from his bowl, scowling. 

“Not an answer,” he drawls. “Come on. Who’s got you moony-eyed? Your endorphins are all over the place, smells like you just got back from a run or something.”

“I am the mind-reader here dog-face, not _you_. You are talking out of your ass, as usual.”

“Sakura is up Sasuke’s skirts,” Kiba inhales a metric fuckton of rice and speaks around it with no particular care for table manners or decency. “So she and you aren’t picking up again. Blessedly — the last time I don’t know how anyone in the village escaped alive. Genma? No, he’s out towards Iwa with Tenten still, isn’t he? He won’t be back before winter, probably.”

“Genma has been engaged to Shizune for three years now, fool. Keep up.”

Kiba snaps his fingers, beaming. “ _Ah_! That paint-faced bastard is visiting Temari-chan —”

“I dare you to call her Temari-chan to her face.”

“ — Has he kept in touch since you visited Suna last? Are you hoping to catch yourself a nice heir?”

“I myself am a _nice heir_ ,” Ino says drily. “I don’t need another.”

“Bah,” he waves her off. “I remember how he looked at your ass in the jounin exams. It _has_ to be him.”

“Everyone, including you, was looking at my ass when we were wiggling out from that swamp. I heard everyone thinking about it.”

“Ah,” Kiba leers at her, wiggling his eyebrows. “When am I not looking at it, though?”

“When you’re looking at Shino’s,” Ino smiles innocently, gratified by the flush at the back of Kiba's neck as he quickly shoves another bite of breakfast in his mouth.

Ino is tired, dreading the clan meeting she has later in the week and Ibiki's return to Konoha this afternoon that will certainly mean a painfully thorough debrief, but for a minute only feels the smile stretching her face and the straightforward, easy weight of Kiba’s thoughtspace across from her. 

“See if you can keep your secret for long,” he sniffs. “I’ll figure it out. The chocolate smell is nice, but it’s weird on you like this.”

“Well, when you do, please let me know.”

Kiba rolls his eyes. “Wanna tell me what the ROOT bastard’s been doing outside of your apartment, then? If you wanna talk about something else.”

“ROOT bastard?” Ino frowns, a little prickle of irritation alight in her belly. “Sai? Why is he a bastard?”

Kiba’s thick eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “Why do you sound defensive?”

 _Damn._ Attentive in all the worst ways.

“I feel...badly for him,” Ino tries for a casual shrug. “Yesterday Billboard Brow was an asshole about him being on their team. Nothing that happened to him was his fault, and the fact he’s not Sasuke frankly should count in his favor, not against him.”

A long, heavy pause. She helped Kiba practice warding his mind years ago, but she hates herself for it now. The exact shape of his thoughts blur fast and hard to catch behind some heavy, fogged glass. 

“...No, that’s not possible. I don’t smell him in here,” Kiba mutters to himself. He scrubs his hand briefly over his nose before Ino feels the little charge in the air as he channels chakra into it. “I’m not wrong — wait.”

Eyes a little wide, Kiba rises to his feet, padding over to her kitchen. “He _has_ been around. A few weeks ago, but I smell him.”

“Kiba,” Ino warns, not that he listens. “Stop while you’re ahead.”

“Really? _Him_? Since when do you even know each other?”

“You know, Shika asked me the same damn thing the first time he walked in on you in my bed.”

“He asked why we couldn’t wait until we were done with the mission and out of Kumo,” Kiba corrects her, scowling. “He knew exactly who I was and I knew exactly who _you_ were.”

“I know you aren’t jealous,” Ino grinds out. “Because even you are not that stupid.”

“He’s not —” Kiba cuts himself off, visibly chewing his cheek. “You know what your problem is?”

“By all means, dog-face, tell me.”

“You think you’re too smart for someone to take advantage of!”

Whatever answer Ino had been expecting, it hadn’t been that. “Fuck you, Kiba.”

Flopping back onto her couch, he slings a heavy arm around her shoulders, his leg slung over hers. “I’m just looking out for you, Yamanaka.”

“You are _just_ being an asshole. Sai isn’t taking advantage of me and he has no reason to try.”

“Ino.” The stubble on his cheek rasps audibly against his calloused palm. “He isn’t a lost lamb.”

“Quit _talking in circles_!”

“You haven’t been yourself lately.” Kiba probably thinks he is being delicate right now. Ino feels a tingle in her first like she wants to punch him in the face. “And if the Hokage or your _boss_ felt like that warranted a little investigation given the nature of your work every day —”

“If they thought I was unstable or compromised, they would interrogate me properly with someone from my clan. At the worst if they had to delegate, maybe Sakura or Chouji —”

“Someone you already know how to manipulate?” He asks dryly. His voice is free of judgement, but Ino still fights an instinctive bristle of indignation. “If it were _you_ , you would choose someone close to your target to get their guard down.”

“And you wouldn’t?” She snaps.

“Probably,” he shrugs. “Kaka-sensei? _Ibiki_? He knows you too well. I think he’d probably try something you couldn’t see coming.”

Ino chews the inside of her cheek and doesn’t answer, tolerating Kiba tucking a little hair behind her ear.

“I’m not losing it,” she settles on sometime later, when Kiba has set to finishing off breakfast one-handedly, his one arm still slung around her shoulders. “I’m not compromised. If anyone wants to ask how I’m fucking doing as a _friend_ , maybe they should just ask instead of shipping me off to Suna or interrogating me like I’m a subject.”

“They probably should,” Kiba agrees easily.

It’s quiet again as Ino struggles to remain un-mollified by his acquiescence. Kiba was hardly as dumb as he wanted people to believe, but even as a shinobi, she doesn’t believe every wild conspiracy theory that breeds in the minds of people taught to lie and cheat and steal for a living. 

Sai was easy to get a read on, really. Ino would know if he had an ulterior motive. 

It was possible that someone wanted to be her friend just for the sake of being her friend, not because she was the Yamanaka heir or second in T&I or nice to look at for an evening and sneak out in the morning before the light was full.

Kiba kisses her forehead, then her cheek before leaving. 

“I don’t need to be coddled, Kiba,” she scolds, though she doesn’t pull away. 

Ino is left cleaning all the debris Kiba conveniently left behind, staring at the card on her kitchen counter until she can’t take it anymore. The paper is thick and smooth in her hands, his formal calligraphy void-black, even, and beautiful to look at even before she starts to actually read it.

_Ino,_

_I believe you give gifts to your friends past a certain point of acquaintance. I do not know your favorite wagashi, and I apologize I cannot return your favor exactly. I hope we can be friends still despite this oversight on my part._

_I remain appreciative that you remembered my preference. I will do better in the future to learn your taste in sweets. Friendships should be fair. Even I know that much. Please do not take my negligence personally._

_You seemed to like my umbrella last night, which is why I assume you wanted to stand under it after we reached your home. From Sakura, I understand you enjoy shopping and you probably noticed it was well made. I bought it in Ame, it has a water repellent jutsu and a handle Tenzou-san carved for me himself on our journey back._

_I would like you to have it. I am sorry it is not something you can eat. I will do better in the future._

_Your friend,_

_Sai_

Flourished, stylized flowers decorate the bottom of the page: bluebell and jasmine. _Grateful friendship._ Ino traces their lines with a featherlight finger. Her chest twists oddly, her throat a little tight. She isn’t sure why she feels the sudden need to laugh and cry, all at once. 

She tucks the note in her bedside table and props the umbrella by the door, disappointed that the rain from yesterday has completely cleared to an azure, Kiri-sea blue. Ino carries a little sweetness tucked behind her navel the walk to work, and it lasts until Ibiki sends a summoning scroll to her office.

* * *

“You haven’t been sleeping.”

Ino ducks her head, less to be respectful and more to hide the grind of her teeth as she slides her boots off in the doorway. 

“She looks better than you, Ibiki,” Kakashi drawls.

“I wasn’t contesting otherwise.”

“If you are both _quite_ done objectifying me and adding ammunition to my growing sexual harassment case.” She kneels down on the tatami mat inside Gai and Kakashi’s main room, gratefully accepting the cup of matcha Shikamaru slides her way on the chabudai. 

“One good sexual harassment case would probably be all I need to retire early,” Kakashi muses. Ino had thought him an odd sort of man before he became Hokage, but having to work with him so closely now after her last promotion showed her how little she truly could have guessed. He was every worst part of Shikamaru and Shino put together with an erratically present lewd streak that would put Kiba to shame. 

“It would break your husband’s heart, though, wouldn’t it?” She smiles at him serenely over her cup, steadying herself on the bitter green smell of it near her nose. “He wants you to do well. An honorable job.”

“How dare you enter my house speaking reason.”

Ibiki throws a poorly concealed glance into the hall leading back to where Gai and Yamato are loudly victimizing the kitchen, which Kakashi pointedly ignores. Frowning, Ino follows it, only for Ibiki to echo her thoughts immediately after.

“Hokage-sama. This is an S-Class debrief.”

“I got the memo,” Kakashi waves his hand vaguely, tone breezy. Ino, with a kunai at her throat, would not ever speak on how badly she knew his vision now was. His thoughtspace is more guarded than most, and without a conscious jutsu Ino only _just_ gets impressions, sometimes. But Ino feels the whiplike _crack_ of frustration lashing out against the heavy ward there as he has to use his nose to get a read on where Ibiki is after squirming around from his spot at the table. Ibiki is no fool, but when Kakashi’s eyes finally settle on him again, a hair too delayed to have been natural, he also doesn’t mention it. 

“We should not be discussing it in your home. There are rooms specifically in the T&I building — ”

“It is my anniversary.”

“Not that I care,” Shikamaru cracks his neck, bags under his eyes and patchy stubble on his face. He’d clearly come here straight from his trip to Suna, but as Ino is displeased with him still, she enjoys this very much. “But you said your anniversary was two weeks ago when the Mizukage wanted to visit.”

“Diligent as always, Shikamaru-kun!” Gai rolls in, a pot of curry balanced precariously on his knees. There’s so much spice in it that the steam alone makes Ino’s eyes sting and blur. “Two weeks ago was the fourteenth anniversary of Kakashi’s thirty-second defeat in our rivalry!”

“And today?” He drawls.

Yamato helps him settle the pot in the center of the low table, muttering. “You know better than to ask.”

“One day, when you and Temari-dono are married, I will tell you!” Gai beams, and Ibiki pinches a hand between his eyebrows. Despite the mask, Ino can’t call Kakashi’s expression anything but utterly peaceful.

“Don’t call her _dono,_ I beg you,” Shikamaru grimaces. “Please, she never lets it go.”

“That is _enough_ ,” Ibiki growls. 

“I agree. I’m starved.” 

“If you touch that ladle, Hokage-sama, I will kill you myself. You can eat after the debrief.”

Ino places her hand on Shikamaru’s forearm under the table.

_What is the purpose of us being there?_

He rolls his eyes. She feels the cool, quicksilver clip of his thoughtspace as he answers her.

_He wants us to hate him so much we beg Naruto to take the seat early._

“This is not a dinner party.”

“Ibiki, who can work on an empty stomach?”

A vein throbs in Ibiki’s forehead, and he turns to face Kakashi fully. “Alright, Hokage-sama. After you.”

He looks pointedly to the mask still covering the lower half of the Hokage’s face.

“Ah, I would never. Guests first.”

“I have a meeting with Shino-kun to do the new ANBU recruit’s psych eval,” Ino takes another drag from her cup, trying to avoid looking at the pot in the center of the table too long, lest Gai offer her some. Luckily Yamato is helping him out of his chair and settling him down on Kakashi’s right side, keeping him distracted. “I hadn’t planned on this taking more than a few minutes. Do we need to reschedule?”

“I believe that would be for the best,” Kakashi sighs, solemn. “I’m sure we won’t be able to discuss everything given how much curry we have to get through first.”

Her knees crack loudly as she rises, downing the last of her tea in one go. This was a wasted trip — every time they had a meeting, the bastard found some way to weasel out of it entirely or push it back to some unconfirmed date. How anything still managed got done was a mystery, but not as much as how he kept coming up with new reasons every time for procrastinating. Surely he was bound to run out at some point. The fact Ibki and Shika both haven’t figured out how to pin him down is most astounding. 

“Yamanaka-san, if you’re headed to the barracks, I’ll join you.”

Ino blinks owlishly as Yamato settles Gai’s chair behind Kakashi and joins her near the door. His face is lined handsomely, and he smells of cedar and oakwood. The smile on his face is pleasantly empty, and for a blink-fast second, Ino finds herself thinking about Sai.

Three things strike her at once:

  1. When she glances at the table, there is no mission scroll to be found. Shikamaru doesn’t even have a pen or paper for notes. When Kakashi suggested they reschedule, neither of them offered up any token protest. Ibiki lived and died by his calendar, and Shikamaru hated to be inconvenienced for the same thing more than once. This was not normal.
  2. Ibiki has his chakra completely walled off from her. He kept wards as tight as Kakashi’s usually, but to completely repress chakra like this was a conscious jutsu — it was barely enough to convince Ino he had a pulse, had he not been present right across from her. He was keeping her out of his head on purpose, even from an accidental brush. The last time he felt this was necessary, Ino was still a chuunin, and Ibiki hadn’t yet learned to trust her.
  3. Yamato-san was her babysitter, her chaperone back to the village, because all of them — including Shikamaru, the rat bastard — thought she was compromised, and they’d drawn her out to the furthest edges of the village, past even the Aburame’s insect sanctuaries, to determine if she was able to continue on in her post or if she needed containment. She thinks of Kiba’s words earlier, about sending someone she wouldn’t see coming. 



“I would like that, Yamato-san. I had a question for you anyway,” Ino smiles, hoping her easy tone masks the beat-too-long pause after his offer. She doesn’t dare risk using any chakra yet to stretch out and see if any of them believe it, but to their credit aside from some placid words of parting, none of them stop her, either. 

She and Yamato don’t speak as they descend the hill Gai’s old family home is settled on. He is the same height as Sai, she thinks, though built stockier. He adjusts his forehead plate as Ino counts her eighth ANBU perched in the trees surrounding them. Ino had the chakra signatures of Kakashi’s personal guard memorized, and none of them match any that she feels now.

Under everything, Ino feels a flare of embarrassment. She knew exactly how much ANBU talked in their barracks, trading gossip for better assignments on the roster. They would go back tonight with a new story:

_Ino Yamanaka has lost it. Ibiki doesn’t trust her anymore. The Hokage doesn’t, either — even that friend of hers, you know they grew up together and everything._

“Yamanaka-san?”

“Call me Ino, please,” she corrects him automatically, shaking herself back into the present. 

“You said you had a question for me?”

“Ah, well. More than one, now. I suppose I’m only wondering if I want to be subtle about it or not.” Ino pulls her hair over one shoulder, idly starting to braid it as they walk. “Do you think I will pass?”

“Hm?”

“Do you think you’ll tell them I’m compromised when you finish interrogating me on the way back to the village?”

“Interrogating you?”

She levels him with a flat look, and after a minute his lips purse as he looks back to the path in front of them.

“Are you well enough?”

“Please don’t insult me with a trick question, Yamato-san. I do this for a living.”

“Your behavior has been erratic. Moody, forgetful —”

“What exactly has fallen through the cracks that I _‘forgot’_?” She asks sharply, before she can stop herself.

“I’m sure I don’t know, being as I don’t work in T&I. As you are well aware, sometimes you receive missions and requests with only the most relevant information, not every detail.”

Unflappable. Their pace hasn't so much as stuttered since they began. She sucks her teeth. Two more ANBU on her left. On one hand, she is flattered they recognize how difficult she would be to decommission, if they actually decided to do it.

“Was being in ROOT a hard job for you?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment, and Ino thinks she’s caught him off-guard. “It wasn’t the easiest thing the village has asked of me.”

“So you can understand why, as a human being, I am allowed to have difficult or complex feelings about my job and still manage to get it done. I could have left when it got hard, but I stayed. I’m not compromised, I’m a loyal idiot. A loyal idiot in need of a pay raise, not an intervention.”

After a minute, Yamato’s shoulders loosen a bit beside her. 

“You are privy to more confidential information than almost anyone in the village. I hope you understand their concern and don’t take this personally.”

“Are you asking if I’m mad at you?”

He doesn’t answer, but the little frown on his mouth is displeased.

“I never know what to call you, you know. Gai and Kakashi always think of you as _Tenzou_ , but when they do, I can’t unwind if you like it or not.”

“As you said, Ino-san. I am also allowed to have complex feelings about my job. My jobs — past and present.”

Impressed despite herself, Ino hums low in her throat and unwinds the braid in her hair, only to do it again. She is absolutely sure that Yamato would be able — would _prefer_ — to spend the rest of the walk back to the village in silence now that his questioning was done, but Ino has always been just a little petty.

“The umbrella is beautiful.”

“...If you are trying to convince me of your mental fortitude, I’m unsure this accomplishes the task.”

“The one you carved for Sai.”

His brow knits together. “Have you two had a mission together recently? I thought you were off the active roster —”

“What did you just say?”

Yamato freezes, some of the color draining from his face. Clearing his throat, he comes to a reluctant stop alongside her.

"Off the roster? I haven't requested any time off. I passed my annual last month, Sakura did it herself."

“You are a capable jounin from a powerful clan. It is odd to not have received a missive in six weeks. Have you not thought so?”

She’d been watched for at least three times as long, if they took her off the roster a month ago. Underneath her feet, the ground starts to crumble. 

“Thank you for your company, Yamato-san. I believe I will walk the rest of the way.”

“I insist —”

“Will you order your ANBU to apprehend me, _taichou_?” 

Without waiting for an answer, Ino channels chakra in her feet and bounds up to the trees. The ANBU do follow, but at a distance. Her lip curls as Yamato's chakra signature joins them, closer than all the others.

She slaps exploding seals on her door and all her windows as soon as she sets foot inside her home, followed by razor wire just for meanness, almost hoping someone tries to enter to feel it.

* * *

Shino comes to find her thirty-five minutes after their meeting was scheduled to begin. She feels his black mood through her door, and when he sends in a line of his kikai between the jamb to crawl up her arm, she finds she can’t pry or flick them off at all. Stubborn fuckers.

Though she’d become familiar enough with it during their mission together last year, the almost staticy feeling that came from stretching her _shintenshin_ to his colony remains odd, especially when met with their full combined, buzzing irritation.

_I am sorry I missed our meeting. Something came up. I will find you tomorrow._

Short and simple. She’s ready to pull back when his deep timbre meets her, echoing through the kikai.

_Are you unwell? What is so urgent? They need to be completed before the end of the week._

Grimacing, she leans back on her couch and flings her arm over her eyes. The kikai tickle as they crawl up her arm, closer to her neck.

_If your bugs get handsy, we are gonna have bigger problems, I promise you._

The kikai still immediately. 

_I will find you tomorrow, Shino. I would not fuck around if I was able to make it._

There is a long, contemplative pause. 

_Should I leave the kikai with you? In case you need assistance?_

Despite herself, a little of the tension knotted in her shoulders loosens. 

_No thank you, Shino-kun._

With no further ado, the kikai leave, and Shino’s chakra signature disappears from her door. She knows from last year all that's under his hood and glasses, and she idly decides that if Kiba doesn't seal the deal soon, Ino will be forced to sweep in and take him herself. 

Ino drinks the final four beers left in her fridge back-to-back, lays down face first in her bed, and sleeps.

* * *

Three fifteen the next morning, Ino paces her apartment, feeling foolish and also unable to change her mind. 

The paper and pen in front of her are from a stationary set her grandmother gave her upon her jounin promotion. It was an odd gift — her other clan members gave her weapons or poisons or maybe new chainmail — but she insisted Ino's marriage prospects would soon soar, and she needed proper equipment with which to answer them. 

Self-conscious of her handwriting for reasons she is unwilling to linger on, Ino puts herself out of her mystery.

_Sai,_

_Thank you very much for your beautiful gift and for your thoughtful letter. I assure you we can be friends even though you did not remember my favorite wagashi. We only mentioned it briefly before, and sometimes friends forget._

_For the record, I like nerikiri. The flower shaped ones especially._

_As a friend, however, I must ask a favor of you. I know your mission may keep you away from the village for some time. I hope it is alright if I write you until you come back, since I won’t be able to talk to you personally until then, obviously, and I think I need a friend right now more than I have in a while. You don’t have to read them all if you don’t want to, of course. I am only asking if you mind me littering your doorstep for a little while in your absence._

_Thank you in advance._

_I look forward to seeing you again. I hope your mission ends soon._

_Your Friend,_

_Ino_

As soon as the letter is sealed, Ino immediately starts another. She writes until her hand cramps up even into her shoulder and the side of her neck, and she keeps going still until her right side is numb and all the pens in her drawer are out of ink, and the words blur to something she doesn’t know how to read anymore. 


	6. Chapter Six

_Sai,_

_One time when we were genin, Chouji, Shika, and I laid a trap for Asuma while on an overnight mission in Kusa. It was mostly some razor wire and a few small exploding tags — nothing he couldn’t handle. Nothing fatal. We were maybe seven months into our training, and I don’t think any of us expected it to work. I’m still a little surprised I convinced Chouji and Shika to do it, but perhaps that’s why._

_But it did work. He had a scar on his thigh the rest of his life where he couldn’t dodge one of the kunai in time. I got most of the punishment for it. It was my idea, so maybe that was fair. I ran laps around the village until my feet were bloody and I couldn’t fit them in my boots anymore. The last half of my final lap, I had to crawl in the dark because my legs couldn’t hold me. I was miserable, but I was proud, still. I felt like a proper shinobi because I finished. I don’t think he expected me to actually do it, in retrospect. When I made it back to the training grounds I found that none of them had waited for me. They were long gone. They either didn’t think I was capable or they didn’t care._

_It took me almost two hours to make it back home. I was too proud to crawl in the village where people could see me, so I hobbled barefoot until I made it. When I saw my mother in the kitchen window, I thought I was going to cry. But my father found me first._

_He didn’t say anything — which was strange, but the whole day had been so far — as he lunged at me. We had sparred before, of course, but never like this. I did start to cry then. I could barely beg him to stop or slow down before he was at me again with another blow. Everything hurt. I remember that. Everything._

_When he finally accepted my yield, he looked at me like he never had before. He asked me if it was easy to defend myself when I was injured. He asked if I could defend my mother now if someone came to attack her._

_I couldn’t, and he knew that. He asked me how I expected Asuma to defend any of us if he was wounded, either. I told him he wouldn’t defend me at the expense of Shika so it didn’t matter, and I had to learn to do things myself since my teacher didn’t care._

_Until Ibiki became my teacher and even after, I kept wondering if one day I would think about what my father told me and it would make sense, or I would agree. The day hasn’t come yet. Asuma and my father both had a certain level of expectation of how far I could go, and when I stepped close or over that...well. I suppose that is the pattern I should have been used to, even if they are both gone. There is one road for me, apparently, and it has never been the one that I really wanted._

_I think they are going to decommission me. I have reached another limit. I don’t know how to feel about it now, though._

_Your Friend,_

_Ino_

* * *

_Sai,_

_Frankly, I don’t know if I should be offended by it or not. Your Woodcarving Friend told me they felt I was moody and erratic. If I were a man, they wouldn’t call me “moody.” They were also unable to tell me any single task I had failed to do, or had done improperly. This is personal. This is about me as Ino, not me as a shinobi. It’s bullshit._

_I haven’t enjoyed working in T &I in a very long time. Not since my father passed. It was an honor, then an obligation, and then it just turned into rubbing my nose in it. Every office and hall I have to remember him not being here. _

_Everyone else gets to move on from the war. I don’t know why I have to be the one to live it still._

_If I think about it, I wonder if part of their concern is my age, and they are just refusing to be honest and say that. It would help Shikamaru and Kakashi both if I were knocked up right now, or at least engaged. He and Chouji will start their families soon — I suppose I am only useful now if I can finish off making the next Ino-Shika-Cho. The years I’ve spent training and working and earning my job are not important, compared to that. Then again, I wonder if I would insist my child get another team. I begged for one, when I was a genin, but no one listened to me._

_My grandmother complains regularly that I am making the clan look indecisive and weak by not choosing a partner. It seems antiquated to me, but the elder council said they won’t let me take the mantle until I do. Personally, for a family who can read each other’s minds, I think this is fucking stupid. They aren’t proving anything. Most days I don’t want to be clan head anyway._

_I don’t know...if I am decommissioned as a shinobi, maybe they won’t want me anymore, either._

_Ino_

* * *

_Sai,_

_I know you won’t know this, but I haven’t left all of these for you at once. That seems much more silly than dropping them off one at a time, for whatever reason. I hope you don’t mind I have been watering your box garden as well — I saw it hanging from the railing on your balcony when I was leaving and it was looking a little sad. I think I nearly gave your neighbor a heart attack when she saw me climbing up the windows. I didn’t expect so many civilians in your building...I apologize in advance if you have to hear about it when you come home. I make sure no one sees me now and mistakes me for a burglar._

_Do you ever think about not being a shinobi? After ROOT, after the war, did you ever think of leaving? I think you have earned it more than most, if you wanted to retire._

_It feels weak to admit that I don’t want to do this anymore. I had to work harder than Shikamaru or Chouji to get even a little respect from Asuma. I had to work harder than I thought I could possibly work with Ibiki just to survive it. It would be a waste if I wasn’t a shinobi, after all of it._

_Thank you for listening to me._

_Ino_

* * *

_Sai,_

_I hope you don’t mind, but when I was watering your box garden today I went ahead and planted some creeping jenny in it as well. There were gaps in between your snapdragons and I thought this would look better — these can take a little maintenance, but I will trim them back myself or show you how to, if you don’t want me to come by your house anymore. I would understand. We would still be friends (I hope)._

_I am glad you found me in the greenhouse that evening. I don’t know if anyone has told you this, but what happened to you — the things that were done to you — it was all unfair. You didn’t deserve it. I hope we would have still found a way to be friends in a life where none of it happened. You are the first person in a long time who wants to be my friend because you want to, and not because you have to. I think more people than I want to admit love me because they must. Maybe I am projecting, but it feels good to not be an obligation to you._

_If I am not in T &I anymore, if they decommission me, I would like you to find me after Ibiki does the wipe clean. We can meet under different circumstances. I believe it when I say we would still be friends. You’re an honorable man, I would want to know you regardless. _

_Your intrepid gardener,_

_Ino_

* * *

_Sai,_

_That last one was pretty dramatic, I apologize. I also didn’t expect you to be gone so long, to be frank. I trimmed the climbing jenny today. I had a sour meeting with Chouji and Shika earlier, and nothing helps me relax like pruning. I’m sorry I keep taking liberties with your terrace._

_Chouji and Karui are engaged, officially. I wish they could give me time to be happy for them properly, as a friend, before he starts in on asking me if my grandmother had set me up with anyone again. I never thought Chouji cared as much about this, but he said settling down makes him think ahead; he tried to make it sound nice. He wants his children to have an Ino looking out for them like I did for him._

_I think he has always listened to Shikamaru too much. He didn’t ask me about what I wanted the whole time. He and Shika both kept me away even as children. They mostly needed each other. Sometimes I feel like they take for granted that I will always be there. I am not Sakura, though. She trailed behind Sasuke and Naruto and even if she doesn’t admit it now, she still does. Sakura is always second, and she will always be second. She has been fine taking crumbs of their friendship, what wasn’t spent on each other. I am not. I don’t deserve crumbs._

_But all we have done is talk about me. That’s rude._

_Your favorite wagashi is the kusamochi, and you said you don’t like very sweet things. What other food do you like? We could go and eat when you make it back. (I hope it is soon. I am running out of space under your doormat for these, and I know your neighbor has tried to be nosy and look at them before)._

_Also, I had to buy you a doormat to fit these under. I think it is cute but also understated, and I think you will like the colors._

_Ino_

* * *

_Sai,_

_I am not usually so mopey. I promise I can be a fun friend. I would hate for you to get the wrong idea._

_Nothing much happened today. I realized I haven’t spoken to Sakura in about a month. I thought maybe she was out on a mission, but I saw her having lunch with Hinata and Tenten on the way to the greenhouse._

_I felt a little sad about it, I suppose. Shika hasn’t written since he left for Suna last week, though he promised to let us know he had made it. It’s sandstorm season there. Chouji and Karui have been holed up in Akimichi quarter wedding planning. I don’t think I will see either of them until they come to ask for flowers for their ceremony._

_Grandmother sent me home from our clan meeting with a stack of letters from men inquiring as to my marital availability. She told me if I wanted to be a civilian, I could marry one._

_Today at the store I saw a tea I thought you would like. I bought it for you, for when you get back._

_Ino_

* * *

_Sai,_

_I wrote Temari, which was petty. Unfortunately, Shikamaru is just as bad as me._

_I got a missive today. However irritated Shika was that I reached out to his soon-to-be-wife to obtain proof of life after he refused to write a simple letter, it was enough to get me back on the active roster today for the first time in months. I don’t know what strings he had to pull with Kakashi and Ibiki to do it — maybe he went behind their backs. Kakashi, at least, probably wouldn’t care._

_Anyway, I’ll be up in Yukigakure for at least a few weeks. I hope you are back before me._

_Sorry for all the letters. I suppose you are just easy to talk to. It felt good._

_Your Friend,_

_Ino_

* * *

Ino settles inside one of Iwa’s towering grey mountains to wait out the worst of the storm. This particular mountain pass was the worst part of crossing into the south of Snow country, but it was still easier than swerving through Kumo to enter through the west. Iwa’s shinobi were far more predictable, firstly, and secondly the weather was, allegedly, usually better.

And to be fair, she _could_ travel through the storm. It was growing dark but not yet full night, and though the air was cold, most of the precipitation from the rumbling, flashing sky was rain and not snow. The ground was hardly speckled with white, and she was probably far enough up the pass to avoid any mudslides.

But Ino doesn’t want to. If Konoha was giving her permission to be away, she would take it. She would stretch it out as long as possible. She hadn’t used hardly any chakra at all on her journey so far, enjoying the leisurely civilian’s pace with a scarf wrapped over her head to hide her hair and wearing some clothes cut in Suna’s fashion that she’d picked up with Temari. She has plenty left to stretch the crevasse in the mountain into a serviceable shelter with a simple doton. And after setting a fire, she even wastes a little sending it to her fingers and the tips of her cold toes in her wet boots to keep them warm while the fire takes its time thawing out the space.

She’s nibbling on the thin slices of shisho-wrapped horse meat they eat in the north and idly flipping through an interior design magazine she had picked up at a market that morning when she feels a little twinge of foreign chakra at the edge of her set perimeter.

Careful not to make any sudden movements, Ino casually pops the last bite of her snack into her mouth. It was better fresh from the market, but that’s only half the reason it tastes a little sour. She flips the magazine shut, and in reaching up to pull her hair back into a sloppy bun, hides slipping the senbons out from under her sleeve.

From the corner of her eye, Ino catches movement. One of the senbon goes flying as she leaps to her feet, only to find herself face to face with an owl about the length of her forearm, its eyes as ink black as its stylized feathers.

For a second, they just look at each other, before the pieces click together. Ino fumbles in her bag for an empty scroll, hoping this is right. Even right in front of her, the chakra from the owl is faint enough to be hard to identify. She hastily unseals the first one in her reach, dumping out the items sealed inside with no ceremony before holding it out and open in her hands. 

The owl immediately flutters up and onto it, and when its inky foot hits the parchment, the lines of its body slip away and slide across the parchment until the words become visible, written in familiar handwriting.

_Ino,_

_I have been advised (Yamato-senpai) to not send you my original letter. He is better about these things, so I am taking his word. Please be assured your letters were entirely private, however. Friends do not breach confidence. He answered my question as a hypothetical. He is very used to this as I seek his advice frequently and I am sure he suspects nothing._

_Still, I have many questions. I have them written down for when you are back so I do not forget them. I will answer the rest to the best of my ability below. Yamato-senpai said this would be acceptable and the correct response. (Hypothetically)._

_I find the doormat acceptable. I appreciate your thoughtfulness._

_I believe I am allergic to creeping jenny. A little cream from Sakura healed it almost overnight. I appreciate your aesthetic concern for my terrace. I have learned something new about myself because of it. My medical file would not be complete without you._

_You are a respected shinobi. I do not believe you need to worry so much about your career, though Yamato-senpai also told me (in our hypothetical conversation) that I should not write such. However, I feel the need to say it and cannot be dissuaded._

_I am awaiting your return. My favorite food is silken tofu. I am told by Sakura the amount of bonito flakes I use is “disgusting,” but I believe that her opinion is wrong. If you would like, I would enjoy your company for a meal on your return._

_I hope your mission is successful. I am sure you will be fine._

_I look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you for my letters. You are a friend like I have read about in the books, and I appreciate it very much. I did not think I could learn to have one like you before._

_Your Friend,_

_Sai_

**Author's Note:**

> Do I have any business starting to post a longfic while I should be working on my novel? No, I do not. But given the state of things, my brain needs a little break. If yours does too, this is for you. Happy endings...if you know what _I mean_ ahead ;)
> 
> ...eventually.
> 
> I hope you're as well as is possible & thank you for reading!! Feedback is always appreciated :) See you next chapter!


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